Hans Asperger was not a member of the Nazi party, but he was a willing accomplice in the murderous euthanasia program of the Third Reich

When the diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome was officially struck from the medical books in 2013, the Asperger’s Society of Ontario was faced with a curious branding problem.

How could it continue to advocate for people with a disorder that does not even technically exist?

That problem now seems quaint in hindsight. A new marketing dilemma has arisen for the ASO and similar groups around the world. This time, though, it has been supercharged by the most toxic association in modern Western culture — Nazis.

Hans Asperger was an Austrian pediatrician whose clinical observations of children in 1940s Vienna were resurrected and promoted by psychiatrist Lorna Wing in 1981, the year after his death. A little over a decade later, those observations became the basis of the formal diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, a sort of high-functioning autism, sometimes described as “mild.”